We begin today with one of the most striking turnabouts in modern public health. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, was a respected medical doctor and professor at Stanford University when Covid struck. He stuck out his neck early, calling out public health mistakes on Covid, the shutdowns, and more. For that, he was targeted and smeared by Dr. Anthony Fauci and others at the National Institutes of Health. But today, he leads the very agency that once worked to silence him. And he’s working to restore public trust after fallout from the wave of government misinformation.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Sharyl: As of very recently, you became acting director of CDC. How did that come about and what does that mean?

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: There was a leadership transition in HHS, the White House called me and asked me if I’d be interested in being the acting director until there was a permanent director. I offered some names up for, for alternatives. But then the president called me a few days ago, and it’s hard to say no to the president. What it means is that I will still be the director of the NIH. That’s my main day job. But over the next couple of months, I’m gonna go work with folks at the CDC help get the agency in a place where the new director, whoever ends up being Senate confirmed, will have an organization that’s running well so that they can get their priorities in place.

Sharyl: Before Covid, of course, you were a very well-respected medical doctor and professor at Stanford. What is the short version for people who don’t know it, of how Covid changed everything for that?

Bhattacharya: As you said, I was a professor, happily publishing in journals, and very few people knew about me. But it was really fun to do that work. During Covid, I was a very vocal opponent of lockdowns. I did a bunch of research that suggested that the lockdowns were not helping people, in fact, were causing tremendous harm to the poor, children, in the working class, all the school closures and all that. Stanford tried to get me fired—then the former director of the National Institute of Health, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling for “devastating takedown” of me and my colleagues. Then, I don’t know, somehow one thing led to another and I became the NIH director.

Sharyl: I’ve spoken to researchers over the years that have understood, without it being spoken, that their research will not be approved unless it fits a certain political agenda. So they don’t even bother to propose some research that needs to be done because they didn’t think it would get approved. Do you sense we will see a big change in the breadth of topics and the types of things that are getting funded now?

Bhattacharya: I mean, absolutely. I mean, I think that removing the ideological kinds of projects leaves a lot more space for actual science. The cultural shift is enormous. And it’s, just being reminded why we’re here, right? The purpose and the mission of the NIH is to do research that improves the health and longevity of the American people. First of all, everyone should be behind that mission. And then second it, once you say that, that’s the mission, that we’re only gonna be focused on the mission, it frees you up from all of the baggage. You don’t have to worry about looking over your shoulder, that you don’t ideologically pure enough. You just focus on science and that science, that can translate over to solving the longevity problems that the United States has. The chronic disease problems, the real problems, I mean, the American people trust us with, you know, tens of billions of dollars. We owe the American people something in return, and that, that something is better health for everybody.

Sharyl: What would you say to the critics, and I’m talking about even establishment medical entities such as MedPage, which is pharmaceutical industry supported and others that come out pretty much roundly against any decision that’s made as anti-science?

Bhattacharya: Yeah, I mean, it’s not anti-science. I mean, just fundamentally what it is, is, a refocusing of the agency of where it always should have been. Just to give you a data point on this, right? So since 2010, the United States has seen no improvement in life, or almost no improvement in life expectancy. Of course, it collapsed during the pandemic, you know, Sweden’s barely, barely budged. And then only last year do we come back up to 2019 levels. If the NIH’s mission is to do support research that translates over into better health and longer life for Americans, well, the NIH over the last 15 years has failed in its mission. And so the idea that it’s anti-science or politicizing the agency to remove political agendas from the agency, it’s almost Orwellian. And so when I see these stories, my general understanding of them is that it’s people that benefited from the old system where the focus was in part on ideology.

Sharyl: One thing I read recently was how there are vacancies as NIH directors implying there are too many what’s going on.

Bhattacharya: Yeah.

Sharyl: What do you say to that criticism? And in the big picture, do you feel like there is a lot of cultural stagnation here that just does not wanna come on board with a new director?

Bhattacharya: I think that the agency as a whole had been essentially led more or less the same way for decades. And it’s been, it’s been decades of, a lot of great successes in that time. I don’t mean to, I don’t mean to downplay this, but I think it’s very important for scientific agencies to have leadership changes for, regularly, from time to time, bring in new scientific ideas and so on. The new leadership then will lead in new scientific directions and a huge amount of promise. I keep hearing, I keep reading these stories, “Now nobody’s applying these positions.” But then I look and like, there’s hundreds of applications. I’m like, so I don’t a lot, I didn’t actually viscerally understand fake news until, until I took this position. I was like, I’ll see the reality hundreds of applications, and I’ll see a story which says, “nobody’s applying.” I’m like, where did they get this story from? I mean, it just absolutely false.

I asked Dr. Bhattacharya about the agency’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded study called “Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery” or RECOVER—started in 2021.

Sharyl: Have I already pinned you down about the RECOVER study?

Bhattacharya: You have not asked me about the recover study.

Two years ago I asked the RECOVER study spokesman to answer why they seemed to be labeling all of their test subject’s injuries “Long Covid”— without regard to whether they’d been vaccinated.

Sharyl: And I said, “Well, how are you differentiating in your data between people who are injured by long Covid, and people who are injured by vaccine, or some combination? Because most of your long Covid victims were vaccinated?” And they quit answering the questions and they will not communicate with me now. So what do you know about the RECOVER study? Am I right that they’re not differentiating and are you concerned about that?

Bhattacharya: I mean, I think the RECOVER study was supposed to be focused on Long Covid, of course. Much of it’s spent before I became NIH director. Just stepping back, there are patients who were injured by Covid that are suffering long Covid. There are patients that were injured by the vaccines. The science of how, of like how to help people with long Covid and vaccine injury, for Covid vaccine injury, actually I think are linked. Like they can learn from each other. I don’t have the billion plus dollars. That’s already spent. It’s water, it’s water on the bridge in some sense. There’ve been some advances out of it, of course, but I, what I wanna do is I wanna get answers for long Covid patients and for vaccine injured patients. Both of them deserve good answers. The vaccine injured patients often are, and actually both are often gaslit, right? They’re told that they’re not actually suffering what they’re suffering. The thing I want to send, the message I wanna send to those patients with and by actions, by like actual research that we’re doing, is that we’re taking their condition seriously. That we’re not gonna ignore it. We’re not gonna throw it under the rug. I mean, I think a lot of times what you’re saw, Sharyl, was that you, you saw this idea that if we study vaccine injury, that then it’ll undermine confidence in vaccines. I think the opposite is true. If we take vaccine injury seriously, that we are addressing it, trying to reduce the likelihood from it happening and then help give patients who are vaccine injury treatments then that we will be more confidence in vaccines rather than the other way around. It’s a flipping over of the mindset. I think that led to the observation you had.

Sharyl: Is there a plan to study vaccine injuries, and treatments?

Bhattacharya: Yup. Yeah, we’re working on that. We’re, so one of the things that Tony Fauci’s old NIHAID is gonna be doing is studying vaccine injury.

Sharyl: What would you say is your overarching goal if you had to kind of synopsize it into a sentence or a slogan?

Bhattacharya: Let’s use science to make America healthy. I love “make America healthy again.” ’cause it’s, it’s one of these things where like, I know people think of it as controversial, but I had no idea why. We, the American people entrust us with tens of billions of dollars and they give us a mission to use that money to do science, that, that makes them healthy. We need to remove all the ideological agendas that have sort of come into the NIH budget, NIH focus. Just get rid of all that. And that’s what I’ve done. I’ve removed all that, and then challenge this American scientist to really focus on what they can do best.

Sharyl (on-camera): For more on this story, listen to my podcast Full Measure After Hours.

Watch the video here.